


Where they have to take you in

by DragoJustine



Category: Adam Lambert (Musician)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-12
Updated: 2010-07-12
Packaged: 2017-12-17 20:07:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/871471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DragoJustine/pseuds/DragoJustine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in (Neil drops by)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Where they have to take you in

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: I know nothing about Neil's actual life, because I prefer my RPS with a minimum of accuracy.

When Neil knocked on Adam's door he was jetlagged, and thirsty, and his back hurt from schlepping his bag through three airports, and he hadn't brushed his teeth in what felt like seventeen hours, and he kind of wanted to collapse somewhere and focus on not crying, so it was really kind of perfect that Adam greeted him with a low, growly, absolutely _sultry_ "Hi, baby."

"So you're ready to take our special brotherly bond to the next level?" Neil asked brightly, and Adam squawked and wrenched the door the rest of the way open.

Adam was kind of sputtering, going "How-- what are you-- did I forget something?" But he reached out automatically to grab Neil's bag, which was a relief, and Neil barged in, because it was that kind of visit.

"No, I'm just showing up unexpectedly, like a suspicious rash," he said. "And I sincerely hope you were expecting someone else."

Adam straightened up from setting the bag down, phone tucked against his ear. He had got the volume up too loud, like always, and Neil could clearly hear the ring and then a voice, chirpy and delighted sounding, saying " _Traffic_ , twinkle-toes! Exercise some patience."

"Brad, wai--" Adam said, and then pulled the phone away from his ear to frown down at the call ended.

"Oh my God, I walked into the middle of an ex booty call."

"It's not like that." Adam sounded more defensive than Neil expected-- than Neil figured he had any right to be, really, and Neil was so cranky that he might say something snarky enough to start an actual argument, but thankfully Adam took a closer look at him. "Are you okay?" he asked, voice softer.

"For certain values of okay," Neil said, absolutely determined to keep it together. "I'd do murder for a bottle of Listerine."

Adam pointed to the bathroom door and Neil went, found a new toothbrush and some floss. It was amazing how much it helped, not feeling like his teeth were wearing a sweater. He felt like a new man by the time he heard Brad outside, announcing "Strippergram for Mister Lambert!" in an enthusiastic sing-song.

Neil stepped into the living room at the same time Brad came in the front door. Adam gave Brad a weak smile and said, "Change of plans?"

Brad dropped his fedora on an end table, his eyebrows in a perfect _you must be shitting me_ arch. Neil watched him consider and discard three or four comments in the first split second, before he settled on "I know I pride myself on being open minded, honey, but I am not up for this particular threesome." His lips were glossy and very red.

"That's okay. I can just--" Neil waved his hand in the direction of the kitchen, vaguely.

"No," Adam said, sounding torn. "You came a long way. We should talk, and order dinner--" He almost sounded like he had convinced himself, but then Brad pressed up against his side, stretched up on his toes to whisper something right against his ear. He caught Adam's earlobe on the way back down, showing a flash of teeth as he tugged and leaving a red smudge by Adam's gauge. Adam whimpered. "Baby, you do not fight fair."

"I can make Sun Tzu cry for his momma," Brad agreed, sounding absolutely chipper even as he rubbed up against Adam's hip.

Adam shot Neil a slightly pleading look across the coffee table, and Neil decided that he was feeling merciful. "We'll order dinner later," he said.

The words were hardly out of his mouth before Adam started hauling Brad down the hallway, one hand around his wrist and the other tucked in the front pocket of his jeans. "Make yourself at home," he called back over his shoulder.

"Adam will resume host duties in fifteen minutes," Brad said, and yelped at something Adam did. "Make that twenty! Thirty, tops."

"There's booze," Adam added, sounding a little-- but only a little-- guilty. Then a door slammed, followed by the distinctive thud of bodies falling back against it. Neil headed for the kitchen with grim determination.

There was no beer, but there was vodka. Neil spent about ten seconds looking for a highball glass before he just mixed himself a massive vodka tonic in an oversized water glass, and made half a peanut butter sandwich to tide him over. It turned out to be too much to hope for Adam to be quiet in his own bedroom -- Adam never had sex when he was living with his parents, so he never developed that particular instinct -- so Neil took his slightly pathetic late lunch out on to the balcony, only to discover that Adam had no patio furniture yet and there was nowhere to sit but a long wooden step.

It was basically completely typical for his life right then, and Neil sat around feeling sorry for himself for a little while until the sheer relief of the fresh air after a plane ride penetrated. LA in May was about as gorgeous as a person could reasonably wish for, and Neil had mellowed out considerably by the time he started to wonder if Brad had been lying about "thirty, tops."

It was thirty exactly when Adam joined him, hair fantastically mussed, carrying some variety of pink drink. "Thanks for the free show," Neil said, and Adam shrugged.

"He gets loud. Sorry."

"Him I can cope with. I'm not related to _him_ ," Neil said, just to draw the blush. He couldn't help it; he was a younger sibling. It was like swimming upstream to spawn.

"So talk to me."

"In what way was that not an ex booty call, man?" Neil asked, dodging.

Adam looked at him, head cocked a little, and allowed him to dodge. "I couldn't do that. Not with Brad. It would mess me up bad."

"Then this was…."

Adam shrugged and stared very hard at the wooden planking of the patio. "He had to make some decisions. And I had to make some promises. And we both had to change some things. And wait for me to get back from the promo tour. It's not--" He darted a gaze over at Neil too fast to make eye contact, a brilliant smile struggling to break through on his face, and then became fascinated with a chip on his green nails. "Not official, but it's sort of on the table."

The boy was fucking _glowing_. Neil couldn't see it behind the fall of shaggy black hair, but it was there; not the just-laid glow, but the other one. 

He looked exactly like he did on the third of July the year Neil was 20, telling them that he had someone to bring along the next day. "I think this one might stick around, Mom," he'd said, glowing, with his eyes fixed on the dishes he was washing. He hadn't been able to make eye contact then, either, like someone might notice how incredibly happy he was and take it all away.

It was a weird throwback to old Adam, seeing the caterpillar inside the butterfly, and Neil couldn't help but reach across and squeeze his hand. "That's good," he said. "Really good."

"So that's me. And you?" Adam asked, and Neil knew he wasn't going to allow any more dodging.

"I'm single and unemployed," Neil said, with a brazen sort of cheerfulness that was positively Brad-like, and took a very large drink.

"What happened with--" Adam's brow creased for a second as he reached for the name-- "Alicia?"

"She didn't want to date me anymore," said Neil, because he believed in over-analysis as much as the next guy, but sometimes post-mortems served only to obfuscate very simple things.

The sliding door behind them squeaked, and Neil heard Brad ask, "How goes the pow-wow?"

"More time," Adam said, lifting his hand in a little wave, and waited for the door to close again. "And the job?"

"That might have had something to do with me calling my boss a brainless, dickless wonder." 

Adam cringed. "What do you need? I know unemployment is crap, and the plane ticket must have been expensive, and I want you to be able to keep the apartment…"

It was annoying that Adam jumped to assuming he was asking for money, which was irrational because he was, sort of, but not really. Deflection, then. "I don't really have the apartment any more either." 

"Stay here," Adam said, with a note of wheedling like he thought Neil might argue.

"I have two hundred and forty-five dollars to my name. I throw myself on your mercy and promise to begin paying rent with all possible haste."

"Screw rent. It doesn’t cost me anything extra. You can share the place with Mom while I'm gone this summer." 

Well, to hell with pride, then.

"Except--" Adam said, and suddenly it was like he couldn't sit still any more, digging at his pocket for his iPhone and scrambling to his feet. "Come with me this summer! Road trip!"

"Did you just offer me the official position of Most Useless Entourage Member?" Neil asked. "Is there any justification for that? More importantly, does it pay?"

"Be my _roadie_ ," Adam said. "Sleep on a tour bus! Carry heavy things and see the country and hang out with the band and try that horrible 'most Lambert you'll ever get' line on a million fangirl groupies. It'll be fantastic."

"Do I even have any qualifications to be a roadie? Is there some kind of test?"

"The qualification is I say so," Adam said. "I'm bad at figuring out what I can and can't get, sometimes, but this I can get. You sit there and drink your vodka and think about watching horrible slasher flicks with Tommy and me on a moving vehicle, okay?"

Neil did, and it was a good thought. Beside him Adam was talking on his phone, all charm and sweet smiles. Neil tuned him in for a minute, just in time to hear "No, he's a total AV geek," and "fantastic pack mule, absolutely, it's a gift," and decided he was happier not listening. 

When Adam hung up his phone and sat back down on the step, they lapsed into comfortable silence. It only lasted a few minutes before the sliding door squeaked open again. 

"You're giving off a general aura of 'pow-wow complete'," Brad informed them. He was holding a pink drink twin to Adam's, and the red gloss was all gone from his lips. His hair's version of sex-mussed was something it took ordinary mortals hours with a stylist to achieve, and the fresh just-washed dampness of his face made his eyes look bright and innocent and impossibly huge. He was barefoot, in jeans and a rhinestone-spangled hoodie that reached nearly to his knees, gaping wide enough around the neck to show a sculptural collarbone with two dark red bruises sucked along it.

Neil took those details in with a dispassionate eye, an occasional habit left over from when he was sixteen and first started seeing pictures of Adam with guys, trying to crack the puzzle of a foreign sexuality by analytical brute force. Like maybe if he looked just right something would click and he would think "wow, that's hot," instead of "yup, Adam's type."

It doesn't work like that, because if it did, Brad probably would have flipped him back on that Fourth of July four years ago. Adam turned and took in the same sight, and his eyes went soft and open and yearning, and he lifted his arm a little to make a space.

Brad tucked right into that space against Adam's side like a puzzle piece and Adam kissed his temple, the lightest, most barely-there contact of lips. 

Everything in Neil's chest seized up tight, and he had to force down the sudden upwelling of envy. _You didn't even love her_ , he reminded himself sternly, _you're just teetering on the brink of maudlin._

"It's good to see you now," Brad said. "Not that, you know, it wasn't before, except that it really wasn't."

"Same to you," Neil said, with just the faintest twitch at the corner of his lips, because he remembered that sometimes you had to just let Brad be Brad. 

Brad leaned around Adam to point his glass in Neil's direction. "A toast! To whatever brings you out to our fair coast."

"Dumped, fired, and evicted," Neil said.

"Well, then you'd _better_ fucking drink, bitch," Brad said, and the three of them clinked glasses. 

"He's going to be my roadie!" Adam said. "I mean, if he wants. Save up some money this summer."

Brad's gaze turned a little predatory, raking Neil up and down. "You'll have to do a video with me," he said. "I don't pay, but I'll sprinkle you with fabulous and fairy dust. You can consider it a tour acclimation measure."

"You can't edit it to sound like I'm hitting on you."

"Deal. Can I edit it to sound like you do obscene things with barn animals?"

"Deal," Neil said solemnly, and switched his drink to his left hand to reach across Adam and shake on it.

The sun was nearly down, horizon gone orange-hazy with dust. "Do you mind if I Tweet about the thing tomorrow?" Brad asked, voice pitched low to Adam. "Just, you know, lay the groundwork. Like we were talking about." 

"Well, we were already doing that. With the GLAAD thing," Adam said, and Neil spared a thought for the sheer suckitude of needing an entire media strategy just to maybe start thinking about dating someone. 

"That wasn't groundwork, that was you finally coming through on all those 'when I get famous, you can meet Ellen' promises." 

"Baby, I _always_ keep my promises," Adam said, a little too fervently to be casual banter. He turned to Neil. "My friend Cassidy has a show tomorrow night. Interested?"

"Oh, fucker, you did not just invite your brother on our date."

"You never said date!"

"Read between the lines," Brad said, and nestled just a little closer. "I'm high maintenance. You beg for me back right before leaving for another three months, I'm going to demand some fucking one-on-one."

"Actually," Neil said, because he was a little brother and therefore obligated, "I think you just got some fu--"

Adam stomped on his foot, hard, and sent him the kind of look that made Neil crow inwardly in triumph. Brad leaned around and leveled a stern finger at him. "I like you," he pronounced.

That was more or less it, just idle chit chat, Adam's plans with Mom, tour rehearsals, things to do before June. 

Neil finally stood and collected their glasses. He left the patio door open behind him and ignored the sounds of slow, soft kissing from outside while he rinsed them. His bag was still by the front door and he dumped it in the guest bedroom, kicking his shoes into the closet.

Going on tour. Huh. It wasn't what he expected when he showed up, but it could be… good. A paycheck. Some company. Weird, funny, good raw material for writing. Best of all, maybe, it would be busy; hectic, even, something to throw himself into and fend off any crash until the immediate hurt faded. 

When he stepped out of the room he heard Adam say, "It's not just Neil. My mother sleeps in that bed."

"But new houses get _sad_ when every room isn't christened properly," Brad said. "The feng shui will be all wrong. It'll get termites." More sounds of gentle, wet kisses, and a high happy noise from the back of someone's throat. "It doesn't have to be the bed. Up against the wall works for me." 

Neil very deliberately coughed. When he stepped around the corner, Adam showed him a fan of take-out menus. "Pizza, Chinese, burgers, other?" he asked.

Behind him, Brad waggled a Wiimote invitingly. 

Seized by a sudden impulse, Neil crossed the space between them in two long strides and flung his arms around Adam. It was a full-body squeeze, hands clenched in helpless fists against Adam's back. "Thank you," he said into Adam's hair, a little hoarse. 

They stayed like that a minute, Adam wrapping him up in one of those impossibly strong, solid, enveloping hugs he gave, until Brad cleared his throat. "I'm choosing to interpret that as a vote for burgers," he said. 

Neil gave a final desperate squeeze, and Adam said, "Any time," and let him go.


End file.
